


the bones of me

by twistedingenue



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Lost Bucky Barnes, M/M, Pre-Slash, Small Towns, a love song to the midwest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-03 14:39:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1748165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedingenue/pseuds/twistedingenue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He gets out of DC, adding to his crimes by lifting a few wallets, and renting a car from the most bored and inattentive clerk he sees who doesn’t even bother to look at the ID he offers.  Apparently at some point he’s learned to drive and just continues on road after road until the rentals timing belt blows as he’s rounding through some small town that appears to have a post office, two diners and a shooting range on the main road.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When he stares down his life-sized photo on the wall of the Smithsonian, he learns that he has more names than just what the mission told him. He’s not sure of this Bucky on the wall, not sure of his place as James Buchanan Barnes. He looks like the man in the photos, but there’s no way to be him.

He’ll take the name anyways. James Barnes is as good of name as any, and at least he gets to choose to use it.

He gets out of DC, adding to his crimes by lifting a few wallets, and renting a car from the most bored and inattentive clerk he sees who doesn’t even bother to look at the ID he offers. Apparently at some point he’s learned to drive and just continues on road after road until the rentals timing belt blows as he’s rounding through some small town that appears to have a post office, two diners and a shooting range on the main road.

Well, when in Rome, shoot something. He rents a SIG-Sauer P220 because it’s familiar in a sea of the unfamiliar. He knows it the way the gun feels in his hands, the surety of how it moves, the force of the kickback. It’s expected, and he aims and shoots by rote.

“You ain’t from here,” the man beside him says while the range is cold, “Visiting relatives?”

“Car died,” James replies, forcing himself to be good natured, “Needed to work off some stress.”

The man beside him is broad and just about barrel chested, with a grey and red beard that’s got a lot more life to it than the hair on his head. “I can understand that. You’ve got a hell of a shot there. Military?”

“Yeah,” James answers, looking down and away from the guy.

“Where’d you serve?”

James almost answers Europe, almost answers Russia, but thinks better of it. He can’t answer Afghanistan or Iraq, he appears to young for any of the other wars that he’s aware of. Instead he smiles, lifts an eyebrow, and the man chuckles.

“That’s fair man, that’s fair. My nephew, he doesn’t like to talk about it either. Neither did my dad, said some things are better left behind.”

“You try not to bring it back with you,” James says as the range officer yells up to see if the line is ready, “But it sneaks in your shoes. It’s what you stand on.” When he’s free to fire, he makes neat holes. He didn’t want a human target. They offered him zombies or deer, and eventually just went with nothing fancy. Just a target. Just bullets. Just a gun.

The range rents machine guns, and James doesn’t know what to make of that.

“Any place I can get a meal and a bed around here?” he asks when the range goes cold again, “And maybe a ride if its not out of your way?”

The man’s name is Chuck, and he’s real happy to give a veteran a ride. The motel has a clean bed and a continental breakfast made up of four different kinds of cereal, some thawed out muffins and bottled orange juice. He takes a cup of coffee but he makes his way out to a strip mall instead, to an unassuming little breakfast joint he saw on the way that promised all you can eat pancakes. The very thought fill James up with some sort of feeling, and he might just call it a gleeful joy.

It’s a Saturday morning, and the place is packed. James worries that he might not be able to get a seat, but Chuck’s voice bellows in a grand and undignified greeting, “Well, look here, you sticking around, Jimmy?”

Right, he told Chuck to call him Jimmy last night, “Looks like.”

Chuck pushes out an empty seat and James thinks for a split second before joining Chuck and two tables pushed together of his friends. Several of them wear lightweight hunting jackets, even though it is well before any hunting season opens, and about half of them have faded and well-worn ball caps. James felt a little out of place in DC, his stubble and his longer hair not reaching the lengths or the irony of the people he now knows to call hipsters, and too unkempt to be smooth and dangerous. He’s had to travel to the middle of the country, but he doesn’t look out of place here. Whenever he picks up a razor or a knife, his hand shakes. They’ve been strong and sure before with a weapon, but right now, he can’t so much as a shave. Bringing a blade to his skin seems like tempting fate. He should be dead so many times over, but he isn’t, and he doesn’t want to be. He’s just unsure how living works when someone else isn’t calling the shots.

James remembers the time before he was just a skilled body, but he might as well try to remember being babe in arms, there’s so little recognition of what those memories mean.  


Taking the chair, Chuck starts the introductions around the table, a pile of men with men with easy names; Joe, Bobby, Pat, Dave, and Chris. They all lean back in their seats from time to time, their hands gripping the back of the chair next to him. James listens more than he talks, listens for their accents and manner of speech, so that he can match it and not sound like a caricature of a New York stereotype.

He does order the pancakes.

“I told you that someday someone was going to do something permanent in Washington,” Pat says, leaning forward to snag creamer off the dish in the middle of the table, “Too many spooks and all of them spying on good folk like you and me.”  


“Well maybe me, “ Dave laughs. He’s heavyset, takes up the whole seat and bald, but he laughs like a horse, “But if we are calling you good people, Pat….” He trails off in a laughing wheeze that becomes a cough, “I’m heading outside for a smoke.” He announces.

James remembers smoking. He didn’t like doing it too much around Steve so much, because it made him cough and wheeze like Dave, but he remembers smoking from time to time, particularly once he crossed the ocean and went to war. A cigarette for a few moments of peace.

So he pipes up, because a few minutes of peace sounds pretty good right now, “Can I bum one off you, Dave?” He’s acutely aware of just how much he doesn’t sound like anyone here, and knows that it will eventually come up and be questioned, and James does not want to answer those particular questions. The uncomfortable questions like, “Where are you from?” or “What brings you out here?” because he can’t tell the truth and he doesn’t know enough about this time and place to lie effectively.

Dave bullshits on several topics as they smoke. James wants to lean up against the wall, but Dave waves him over to the side of the strip mall, “Owners here get their balls all wound up if you smoke in front of the stores. Says it ruins their ambiance.”

“When did smoking become such a crime?” James says back, matching his accent.

“You tell it kid, it’s like you can’t do shit anymore without running into a new law some guy from the government thinks we need. Like we can’t regulate ourselves unless there’s a law on the books for it.”

James doesn’t know anything about that so he just smiles, keeps smoking, but it doesn’t taste the same. He’s got too many memories of what cigarettes should taste like and this isn’t any of them. Dave kind of looks at him for a short minute, just long enough that the hair on the back of his neck stands up.

“You need to take a picture or something?” he says, deciding he’s done, drops the butt and puts it out with his boot, twisting it into the ground. Dave looks unimpressed and and jerks his head towards a bucket filled with sand. “Sorry, not from around here.”

“You just, you got a look to you, you sure you don’t have family in the area?” Dave asks.

“Not….” Well this he can lie about, “Not for a long time. Not anyone left to care as far as I know.” Another lie. James might have someone that cares about him. Maybe once he’s done sorting his life back out from being turned inside out, shocked hot out of his mind and put away on ice to keep for later, maybe then he can see if there’s anyone out there that can handle him and all his parts.  


“Rough life, Jimmy?” Dave looks at him like he’s kind of nuts. Like he’s a kid who shouldn’t have much of a care in the world. Then something changes in the older man, just ripples through him and softens him up and he looks like, well he looks like a father.

“The roughest.” He cracks a smile, “But it can’t all be bad, right? You got kids?”

“Two, haven’t heard much from the boy since he ran off at a year ago. Was this close to kicking him out ‘cause of the drugs, but thought we’d try to work it out.” He shakes his head, hiding a bright smile, “ But my daughter, she’s fifteen and going to be a real delight once she gets over being all giggly and awkward.” Dave settles back on his heels, grounds them against the sidewalk, and James finds that he’s concerned about a man he’s known for all of an hour, “You?”

“Never the opportunity. You worry about your son?” He asks, not knowing what to say to a man who has such a burning need to talk that he lays his troubles down to a stranger. Dave nods slightly, slowly, as if he’s just now realizing that he’s given up too much of himself, “Then it seems like you’re doing the best you can. Let’s go back in, I need another round of pancakes.” 

The waitress has already beaten him to it, hot and ready pancakes sitting at his place at the table. It’s not the place he thought he’d stop moving, but it works for now. He can get his bearings here as well as anywhere.


	2. Chapter 2

The motel room James rents is better than most of the accommodations he’s been put up in over the few years. He’s slept in planes, vans, in chairs and slumped over in corners —hoping that he wouldn’t be noticed right away, and that he could have a few minutes where there was no all encompassing mission in his head. The quiet and stillness was intoxicating and it was easy to get lost in it before the inevitable would come. So this motel room, with moderately clean bedding and a coffee machine is nice, it’s good.

James doesn’t particularly want to move on from here quite yet, even if he really should. It’s not safe to stay more than a couple days or to stop moving. There’s no telling if HYDRA is waiting for him, to turn him back, now that they can operate a little more openly and not hide within secrets. But maybe that means they don’t need him, the ghost in their machine, to do their dirty work. If he’s watching the news right, it seems they’ve learned to create new horrors, just as controlled as he was.

If they’re lucky, they are just are blank and wiped clean as he had been.

He should move on, but instead he watches the television, practicing the shift in vowels and speech patterns from the local news, discerning what’s important. There hasn’t been enough rain in past years, the corns been getting in late, but this year seems better. Might be a good year yet, but that’ll depend on the summertime heat. If anyone notices that how he’s talking has changed, no one says anything to him. He’s at the range most afternoons, ends up helping out more than actually shooting. The owner figured out that “Jimmy has a eye for what people can handle” right quick, and he matches up the right piece for out-of-towners who come to try their hand at something new.

Mostly, he gets paid in a round or two at the bar and lunch now and then. It’s nothing like scrambling for work as a kid, when all he really had was a face to trust and a back to break. Now he’s got skills and he’s adapting how to use them. James stares down at the credit card he’s been using. It doesn’t feel right anymore, he can hear Steve’s voice, all of his voices, from the little pipsqueak from school to Captain America telling him that it isn’t right to steal Bucky. That person could be just like us. This could be all they have.

He’s got Steve’s voice as his conscious again. He likes that, because Steve steered him right but never away from taking action. The television is full of people who want to talk about kind Steve Rogers, who stood up for what he believed in (it is also full of people who want to vilify all that Steve has done, releasing HYDRA into the wild. James has his suspicions about FOX News and who tugs their purse strings) but it often makes him laugh. Good Steve, Kind Steve — they didn’t know Cocky punk Steve, didn’t know when to shut up Steve. Someone called him gentle, and James had a laughing fit that ended in tears. Steve would throw the first punch if you gave him reason too. Sometimes that reason could be pretty damn flimsy.  
The fucker may have a heart of gold, but the stubborn will of a donkey’s hind end. James misses him. Misses him, like well, like a limb. He’s got full knowledge and understanding of what that’s like. A phantom pain that extends beyond his body, into the ether of what should be.

It wouldn’t be that hard to track Steve down. From what he sees on television, the group that Stark calls the Avengers are becoming quite visible now. A public face to the private secrets have been splashed out for the world to soak up. That would be the easy part, but what comes after he knocks at the door? James can’t think that far ahead yet, just wonders how long it will be until he can see past the next day.

On the positive side, there is at least a next day to look forward to, he gets that. He doesn’t want to off himself at all, even if the memories hurt and he’s not quite sure how they all fit together. James likes getting up, watching television to catch up on how woefully out of synch the media is with reality. He’s been in the propaganda films before, newsreels to send back home and motivate the home front, a rosy memento of war, and what he watches is worse in new and terrifying ways.

He sees HYDRA’s tendrils in the media, creating fear and mistrust, creating panic with threats from within that aren’t really threats at all. HYDRA’s real power comes from it’s seamlessness; how it seeps into the world unnoticed. He even hears their echoes when Dave and Chuck talk politics at the end of the day. They’ll work each other up in a lather about some shared unfounded manufactured fear —anything from the local prison closure to “them illegals” or how the president is going to take their guns away.

“What do you think,” Chuck asks after his third beer of the night, realizing just how quite Jimmy has been, “Worlds gone downhill with the Washington elites in charge.”

“I think you don’t have to worry about the people who are at the very top,” James twists his bottle between his hands, “They get there and realize just how little they can change things. Nah, you got to worry about the people who are happy to stay just behind the scenes. They’ll drag the world down faster than any president.”

“You saw some hard shit, didn’t you?” Chuck asks, chuckling but serious. James likes Chuck, for all the lies he’s been spewing, they aren’t his own lies. Chuck is refreshing in his gruff earnestness.

“You can say that,” James says, and the way his mouth slides over the words is pure Bucky, the way he flirts against the syllables. It feels good, it almost feels like himself, “The worst comes when people who had petty power decide they want the real shit.”

It occurs to him right there, that Steve started his life fighting against bullies with petty power and worked his way up the line. And someday, he wants to be Bucky alongside him again, and pull him out of tight spots and earn back devotion.

He means to just settle up his tab tonight and head out, and the silence that follows gives him good opportunity. James just can’t keep drinking half the night on someone else’s dime, and stealing the rest from some schlub. He fingers the raised numbers of the card through the wallet’s thin leather, before digging into the cash. He’s too traceable now.

“Hey, Jimmy, you staying in town a little longer?” Chuck asks, not doing a very good job of hiding that he was looking at the crumpled bills in his wallet, “You haven’t met her yet, but my wife Carolina, her cousin needs a few extra hands this summer. Hailstorms suck for everyone except roofers. It’s not always steady but he pays cash.” He reaches out and hits the leg of Dave’s stool with an audible slap.

“Hey, yeah, that reminds me, my sister could use some help in the fields and at the market. Arm like that, you’d bring everyone to her booth to gab and buy some lettuce. Be better than a dog.”

Chuck hits his stool again, this time as a warning. No one’s even done so much as mentioned his arm, but it’s not like James thinks they are blind or obtuse, just know enough to ignore it. He doesn’t really mind though, if he did, he’d hide it better.

“It is a conversation starter, isn’t it?” James waves his fingers at Dave, the articulating joints creak with use, “I could use the work before I get moving again, I can stick around for a while longer.”

 

Alex, the cousin, scrunches his brows together when he first sees James, and his eyes are drawn back to his arm every few seconds. His mouth twisted from side to side, “I guess we could always use a runner on the ground, if that’s your speed. Can you do that?”

James flicked his fingers against the metal, “It’s a new design, I can handle a hell of a lot more. More than I could before I lost the arm, if I’m going to be honest with you.” 

James understands that they way he looks now, he’s not really all that intimidating. His arm can be off-putting, but that’s not the same as intimidating. He doesn’t walk the same way he did just a few months ago, even less like he did a lifetime ago. He slows his steps, doesn’t slink into his hips around pretty women, walks with straightforward charm as much as he can without completely throwing off his center of gravity. But Alex? Alex tries for intimidating and just ends up looking confused at his own competency.

“Yeah, okay. How are you at heights?”

James has spent a lot of time on the top of buildings being perfectly still and waiting for a clear shot, so he tells the truth, “I don’t have a problem with them. Heights are easy.” It’s the staying still that’s hard. He doesn’t think he’s going to be staying still much longer.

It feels like nothing else to be repairing and installing roofs. James heads up nice and high and sweats his brains out in the summer sun; when the day is done, some small part of the world comes back into order. James does that. He can help bring some little thing to rights and make enough to keep paying for the motel room. 

He’s met Carolina now, she’s sweet and stubborn, just a hair over 5’5 and has the prettiest blonde hair. She’s a little thick around the middle, and it’s all from the children. He hasn’t spent more than two hours with her before she laughs and refers to it as her fighting weight, completely unprompted. He hasn’t spent more than three before he’s being driven up to the Goodwill and has a pile of clothing thrown at him. Jeans, shorts, t-shirts, a few cotton button downs. Nothing terribly fancy, but it’s clothing that he chooses and pays for, no one else making the decision for him.

Carolina’s not the kind of woman that Bucky would have gone for, but it’s the kind of woman that he wanted for Steve. Someone that could stand up with him, and also be able to stand against the stubborn ass. Just in case Bucky wasn’t around, Steve would need that. He tries to ignore the pain in his heart when he thinks about Steve, how that pain has shifted over time, into something that feels different from the brotherly affection they shared. It’s not quite nostalgia, he’s not longing for days that are gone and closed behind them, but it’s more nervous, a back patter to his heart beat.

It’s two in the afternoon, and he’s been spending quality time with a gun — a roofing nailer — and he stands up to wipe the sweat from his head with the shirt he’s discarded. He’s disgusting, and he pats at the sweat on his chest and stomach, tanned from just a couple weeks work. He looks out as he takes off his cap to re-tie his hair back, and waves to a couple of teenaged girls who are watching from the deck of a house across the way. They giggle, turning in on the girl in the center, who blushes. It’s probably not the best idea in the world to put on the charm, but they are across the yard.

“Put on your damn shirt,” Alex yells up.

“Why? It’s hot!” He throws back with a grin, swinging his arms front to back and crosses them above his head. His shirt whips around in his hand, creating a slight breeze.

“I have a request from every father in the neighborhood to stop tempting every woman over the age of twelve! You make the rest of us look like schlubs, Jimmy!”

James does, and he closes his eyes and basks in the sun, letting the moment just pour over him. It’s hard work, rebuilding, but it’s good work.

That night at the bar, Chuck says with a wry sort of smile, “You don’t actually go by Jimmy, do you? Why’d you let me call you that?”  
“It was easier at first,” he answers, a little more sure of himself, “You know what now? Call me Bucky.” They click their beer bottles together after Chuck repeats his name, calls him Bucky, and it’s the best feeling hearing his own name in somebody else’s voice again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> adjusted tags a bit, because this will end up a little more pre-relationship than relationship.
> 
> You can find me at [ my tumblr](http://twistedingenue.tumblr.com)


	3. Chapter 3

Somewhere over the summer, Bucky's been upgraded from helpful stranger to almost one of the boys, and he gets the impression that the only reason he's not, is because he hasn't lived in the area for forty years. Carolina clucks her tongue over him and feeds him every few night. After she realizes he's been living in a motel for more than just the past few weeks, she steamrolls over Chuck and demands that Bucky move in.

"The shed in the back isn't much, but it's got a guest area," Carolina pats his cheek and tells him to pack. "Just don't tell our agent, and you can stay there until you get your own place."

Between the work, earning his keep, and being the go-to guy for the history category on trivia nights at the bar, Bucky still doesn't feel much like himself. It's okay, though, he's starting to realize that he's different now, and he's not going to return to some static and stuck version of James Barnes. He's a modern man now.

"You need a haircut?" It's ostensibly a question, but it's one that Bucky thought would come from Carolina or her cousin Amy. He spends Saturday mornings unloading her truck for the farmer's market. He doesn't expect the question when he's kneeling on a rooftop, checking shingle damage, and he doesn't expect it from Dave.

"Do I need a haircut?" He replies carefully. His handlers sometimes cleaned him up, but the last set they didn't worry too much about how the Winter Soldier looked. They only cared that he kept quiet and accurate.

“What’s on a man’s head is between him and God, son,” Dave answers, “but my daughter, she’s at the beauty school and needs a guy to come in for some test or something, and her friends are either busy or got their heads buzzed for summer. If you need a haircut, I’ll drive you over myself.”

There’s not any pity or even kindness to his words. It’s Bucky being asked to do a favor, not being ordered by his boss, not being looked at and derided. He doesn’t have to do it. He pulls out the hair tie he wears while working, runs his fingers through his hair. It’s a vestige of their cruelty, but it’s also been a way to distinguish his lives apart.

He could stand to be a modern man.

“Yeah sure,” he says.

Dave drops him off at the school, introduces Bucky to his daughter, Sarah. She’s exactly the way he remembers the women he dated: bright and breezy, quick to smile and chat. He likes her, likes how her hair looks both soft and dangerous, almost half shaved off, and the rest a curly mess, fading from a dark brown to a burnished copper.

In addition to a men’s haircut, she’s also practicing the other art of the hairdresser: collecting information. They aren’t so different in that respect. Just different sorts of blades and implementation. Not to mention the end results. Sarah asks, “you seeing anyone?”

Bucky tenses up. He isn’t, obviously. But his first thought was of Steve, of the way he looked and sounded saying his name. How Bucky kept trying to kill him even when the terrifying, dark blankness of his mind started to break apart, and how resigned, but determined, Steve was to just get a moment of clear recognition out of him.

They say that everything is clearer in hindsight. Bucky’s just got a lot more years of hindsight to look back on than most people.

“Okay, not asking that question again. Somehow I doubt you’d be here if you were seeing someone. Let’s try again, where are you actually from?”

There is a growing mess of hair on the floor, Bucky just told her to make him look good, something stylish. Sarah had gotten this wicked gleam in her eye and told him he was in good hands.

“Brooklyn,” he answers without a hint of his accent. Bucky’s proud of how he’s acclimated, fits in here. He can be normal.

“Really?” Sarah says, her scissors still and too close to his head for his liking. His neck gets warm and Bucky has to breath in and out in cycles. Three seconds in, hold it, three seconds out, repeat. “I’ve always wanted to go to New York City. What’s it like?”

“Different than what I remembered,” he says honestly.

“So what are you doing out here? New York City, that’s like, so exciting. Everything happens there.”

Bucky looks at Sarah in the mirror. She looks so painfully young. She’s eighteen and just starting out in life. When Bucky and Steve were eighteen, they had already been living it out for a couple of years.

“Sometimes you just need a place where nothing much happens at all.”

Sarah huffs in disagreement, but he’d wanted excitement at her age too. A pretty date, a hot piece of music, a decent meal. He didn’t want to fight a war, but he would. She ends up giving him a pretty nice haircut too. It’s styled messy but short, and he doesn’t look like a dapper young man or a hard and cold assassin. He just looks like someone he’d see on the street.

He looks good. Like he belongs here, in this time if not this place. He asks for a couple more ways to style it, because Bucky Barnes has always cared about how he looks. Bucky thanks her with a smile, and when Dave picks him up to get back to work, he gets called a ‘god-damn hipster,’ when he really means thank you.

 

"You in trouble, kid?" Chuck finds him in a corner of the bar that disguises itself as a pizza place. The pizza's mediocre, but the beer is cold and plentiful, poured in pitchers by default. Bucky's back is pressed against the wall, slumped a little in the booth, and he'd watching a couple of toe-headed kids figure out how to work the dartboard.

How does he even begin to answer that? He's sure HYDRA would love to track him down and wipe him clean again. He's in an awful lot of trouble if anyone within the intelligence community gets an inkling of who he has been. "Not currently," he snorts.

"You on the run from anyone?" Chuck presses again, looking nervous and tapping his fingers on the plastic of the booth seats.

Bucky levels his eyes at his pitcher of weak-ass beer. "I have no idea, Chuck." He can't look up at the guy.

"Guy came into town today, asking questions, any new people in town. Guy they described sounded a lot like you."

"I am a man of distinction." Bucky wiggles the fingers on the metal arm. "This guy? Tall and blonde?"

"No. Black guy. I told him I didn't know anything about no metal arms. He gave me his card, Buck. Told me to call him if I saw you.”

It should have been Steve after him. If it had been Steve, he would have, well who knows. Maybe he would have taken the card and given Steve a call. Figured out where the idiot is hanging his hat these days without Bucky to keep an eye on him, see if it’s a place that Bucky can stomach.

“It’s no one I know then,” Bucky answers.

“Do we need to get you out of here then?” Chuck leans in close. “Kid, if you have problems catching up with you that you need to handle -“

Bucky cut him off, shaking his head. All this man has done for him, Christian charity, clothing him and feeding him; Bucky doesn’t want to abandon goodwill, but also wants to be a good man and not destroy a town if the people looking for him are the wrong sort. “Then what, I should do it elsewhere?”

“He seemed alright, the man. Good-natured, clean cut, articulate sort. Said he wanted to help you, that a Steve was looking for you? ” Chuck winces. “I wanted to trust him, but it isn’t my life. But if you need to head out, I can slip you out when the semi’s start coming through tonight. Can get your paycheck in your pocket, no questions asked.”

“Steve?” Of course, Steve isn’t working alone. Steve’s learned that he doesn’t have to be all on his own, that’s something Bucky taught him. You don’t have to rely on just yourself to fight or live. Maybe Steve’s caught on to that for once. If Steve’s looking for him — but then, it’s not like HYDRA doesn’t know his history. He bites his lips in frustration, sucking up the bottom lip and dragging it across his teeth and nearly draws blood. He wants to see Steve. Wants to know how deep the well of affection goes these days.

Even if Steve offers nothing more than a handshake, Bucky’s place is beside him. Even if he comes to find that all he wants is a handshake. That’s just how things are. It’s early yet.

“Well, if it’s Steve,” he finishes, “then I think I’ll stay put, and see how things go. I’ve got to get up early and be at the market tomorrow.

“Steve, someone we should keep a lookout for?”

“Chuck, believe me when I say it, when Steve comes around, you won’t be able to miss him.”

 

By ten am, it is already blistering hot, and Bucky is lucky to be under the fold out tent. No one wants to accidentally brush up against his arm if he spends a little too much time in the sun, no matter how often he tells them that his arm won’t burn them. He’s often regulated to bringing up boxes and weighing green beans and spinach, and he’s not ashamed to admit he’s eaten a carrot or two with the greens still on them. He might be eating one right now.

“Jimmy, get that out of your mouth right now,” Amy admonishes. “Those are for paying customers.”

"I could be a paying customer," Bucky retorts, the greens shake and dangle in time with his words. "If you'd let me."

"I could pay you in vegetables, and you'd be happy. It's like you'd never seen a beet before, I swear."

Bucky likes being able to bring back food to Caroline, and he's been learning how to cook them. Everything gets roasted, steamed, mashed and baked. Never boiled. There's spices aplenty, and he doesn't feel guilty at all when she has to replenish them from the grocery store for him, because he's cooking for the family.

There's no real bustle to the town. It's quiet, and it bugs him some nights, because the quiet always came after the pain. There's no steady stream of cars or crying coming from the street or the apartment beside his thin walls. Steve doesn't sleep with a slight wheeze in his bed. But he likes it here; he likes all the people with no ulterior motive higher than getting into the PTA leadership or the right committees at church. Nothing that will change the world, no one is just trying to survive to the next day.

It's comfortable, if a little dull. He can't see his life always being here, but he can see life again that exist beyond missions and death.

"Well, that's a work of a man. Got to love the tourists that come in." Amy sighs with a hint of lust-filled contentment. "So much nicer to look at than the men around here. Yourself excepted, Buck, you haven't had time to build up a gut yet."

Bucky can't see the man that Amy does. She does have keen eyesight when it comes to picking beans and that might translate to picking people out of the crowd too. "Maybe you'll get lucky Amy, and he'll come and sweep you off your feet, take you away from this inhospitable life." He teases shamelessly until he’s got another customer clamoring for beans and handing him cash before he can even finish weighing it on the digital scale.

It’s another half hour like this, before he’s taken the money of a woman he feels like he knows as a ghost, the ends of red hair poking through a sloppy knit hat, and handing her back a small sack of tomatoes. He watches her leave almost like he’s looking down a scope; he can see her so in focus against the crowd. Something is about to happen here. He’s a weapon in and of himself, he’s got a knife strapped down where no one can see, he just hopes no one here is stupid enough to pull out a gun and try to defend themselves. They’ll just get themselves killed if it comes to that.

He’ll push Amy down to the ground, and he’ll run, draw whoever is hiding in the crowd away. Either they’ll stop shooting or they will follow him, but he’s got to keep them from hurting anyone in the vicinity. Bucky mentally preps, even as he refers someone asking if they are organic farmers over to Amy, but the shift in atmosphere that precedes violence doesn’t come.

“Bucky, can you grab some more quarters?” Amy asks, and Bucky dutifully walks over to the truck and takes out the lockbox that she hides with the rolls of quarters and crisp dollar bills from the bank. There he hears, even feels the change in the air, but it’s not about violence, it’s almost hesitance.

“Bucky?” 

He doesn’t look. If he looks, and it’s not Steve? Then every little support holding up the fragility of his ego is going to come crashing down, and he might just die here in a podunk little town.

“Do you know who I am?” The voice that sounds like Steve asks. There’s real fear in his voice, and for a moment, Bucky thinks of asthma attacks and the panic of breathing. 

“Steve,” he says, his voice low and broken, and he dares himself to look up and look the voice in the eye. “Took you long enough, asshole.” He finishes, because it is Steve. You can gussy him up, stretch him out to the atmosphere and put enough weight on him to sink a ship, it doesn’t matter. Steve is a constant in the life and times of James Barnes.

“Well, you did get a haircut since the last time I saw you. And a tan. Hard to recognize you in your disguise as a country boy,” Steve retorts, choked off by the force of Bucky’s grip around him. Not grip, an embrace, because try as hard as he has here, nothing feels so much like home than Steve. 

“I’ve got a few people I should introduce you to,” Steve says with heartfelt awkwardness, “Sam’s been in town, and Natasha bought something from you already….”

“Bring them over, you know, there’s this great diner. In the mornings, they have fantastic pancakes,” Bucky says with a grin. Amy yells at him about the quarters. “Let me finish up here, and we can go.”

He’s not quite ready to leave quite yet. He’s got a couple of roofs to finish, and it would be rude and horrible to leave them half-done and Dave in a bind. Amy needs the stand loaded up in an hour, and Chuck and Caroline deserve a hell of a lot more than just an empty shed. Maybe he can introduce them to Captain America as a thank you for helping him remember that people are more than just their bones and blood to be broken and spilled.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me at [ my tumblr](http://twistedingenue.tumblr.com)
> 
> twistedingenue: I'm kind of over calling bucky "hobo" considering when he's at the museum is just a carhart away from looking like half the men around here  
> shinykari: ahhhh, yes I mean, his hair is probably a bit greasier than average, but the hat and the stubble? Yeah, pretty much.


End file.
